Portrait of Davide Campari

Davide Campari is the son of Gaspare, who runs a liquor factory in Turin before deciding to start his own business in Milan: in the "Coperto dei Figini", a commercial area around the Duomo, he organizes a craft distillery. When the "Coperto" is demolished, it acquires a space, at the entrance of the Galleria, where it moves in 1867 and in which the famous Bitter is born. His son Davide studied first in Switzerland, then specialized in the technique of the liquor store in Bordeaux and in Paris in administrative technique. When his father died in 1882, he succeeded him in the direction of the factory, which was first enlarged in Corsico, then in the large plant in Sesto San Giovanni. He bought another space in the Gallery, opened a café-bar still known today among the Milanese as "Il Camparino", with a luxury restaurant next door, and branches of the company in Paris, Lugano, with representatives in Brazil, Argentina and the United States. In his memory the heirs benefit the Ospedale Maggiore, subsidizing the construction of the pavilion dedicated to him in the Sesto San Giovanni Hospital. A first portrait of the benefactor is commissioned by the Artistic Commission of the Ospedale Maggiore to Leonardo Dudreville, who had already painted Quintilia Campari, wife of Davide, but this work is not considered sufficiently similar and decorous by the heirs, who request a second one always to the same artist. The first painting is withdrawn by the heirs, while the second enters Quadreria: it is an excellent example of Dudreville's portraiture, which manages to characterize the character in his social as well as psychological reality through a sober setting and a balanced composition. Davide Campari, in frac, with a thoughtful and detached expression, is depicted in the Scala foyer. His monumental figure in a dark suit at the center of the picture is naturally placed in the large reduced, with dimensions further expanded by the perspective foreshortening. The artist gives the character an interpretation that connotes his social role, as his heirs desired, but not courtly, indeed, without renouncing a lively realism.